The Lawrence City Commission recently approved a plan that would eliminate more than half of our only outdoor pool’s open water space, and more than 1,680 people have signed a petition asking the commissioners to reverse their decision.

Not only would the city’s recent decision decimate the size of our outdoor pool, but the approved plan overtly conflicts with the requests our community made through the city’s extensive community engagement process.

The first commitment that the Lawrence city government makes to the public in its strategic plan is community engagement. It states that the city commits to “Listen, share, and engage with our community to drive action and build trust in City government. We invite and welcome all community members to collaborate and innovate with us.”

This public engagement process is supposed to shape development plans so they reflect the needs and desires of our community, but our community did not request a dramatically smaller swimming pool in the feedback they provided the city. Our community requested water spaces to swim in.

The vast majority of community input about the pool renovation was collected through three opinion surveys that received more than 3,300 responses. The first opinion survey asked people to vote for the top six pool spaces and programs they wanted to see in the renovated pool.

• “Open swim area” was one of the top three pool spaces our community requested. Despite this clear request from our community, all of the design concepts produced by the Parks and Rec department and their consultants eliminated more than half of our open swim area.

• In this same question, a splash pad ranked sixth out of 11 possible pool spaces our community desired, and yet a splash pad was included in every single renovation design concept, while top features the community requested were ignored.

• The top two desired programs for our pool were “recreational/open swimming” and swimming lessons, both of which require open swimming space.

Surveys offer predefined answers for people to select, but these predefined answers don’t always reflect the answers people want to give. In the three pool opinion surveys conducted by the city, respondents could only vote for “open swim space” in one out of 25 questions, while they could choose “lazy river” in five questions. De-emphasizing one predefined answer, while emphasizing another, biases the survey and produces misleading results.

Not one question in any of the surveys asked for our community’s feedback about losing much of our pool’s water space. Not one question asked if we wanted a lazy river or a splash pad at the expense of losing our primary swimming space. While a lazy river sounds like a wonderful and fun addition to our pool, we do not want to exchange a 196-foot-long lazy river for 4,800 square feet of open water that is our main recreation area.

I don’t believe that our community’s feedback about the pool renovation supported the design that was finally approved, and our petition affirms that belief. Almost 1,700 people agree that we value open water that you can swim in, and we believe that preserving the size of our current facilities should be the city commission’s first priority in a pool renovation.

The commission will be considering this plan again at their Tuesday, Oct. 15 meeting. During the public comment section for this item, our coalition will present our petition and our arguments for a different plan for our swimming pool. If you would like to support our efforts, consider:
• Signing our petition at change.org/lawrence-pool;
• Writing to your commissioners at commissioners@lawrenceks.org and ccagendas@lawrenceks.org, and/or
• Attending the Oct. 15 meeting, which starts at 5:45 p.m. at City Hall, to show your support for our coalition.

— Holly Krebs (she/her), Lawrence

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